


the carriage held but just ourselves (and Immortality)

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: Gen, Hurt, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 06:08:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck's last Drift; Stacker's last time piloting a jaeger. </p>
<p>Or, when Chuck decided to give Stacker the last, most perfect gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the carriage held but just ourselves (and Immortality)

**Author's Note:**

> the title is a referense to a Dickinson poem, 'Because I Could Not Stop For Death'. I forgot to mention that when I first published this.

Chuck stood in the conn-pod beside Marshall Pentecost, his arms stuck out in front of him as techies fitted him into his drivesuit.  
He felt unsteady, flayed, his entire mind raw, and beneath his concrete determination he felt only a kind of sadness.  
Herc's last words to him were still ringing in his head.  
His son. His _son_. And he knew Herc wasn't a man for redundancies, that that was the closest Herc could come to saying he was giving Stacker his guts, his everything.  
Hell, he was giving up Stacker _himself_.  
His throat burned. He thought of asking someone for some water, thought better of it, and didn't.  
Chuck didn't think, as the techies screwed them into their drivesuits, as they ran last-minute diagnostics.  
One of the electricians--a mousy dark-skinned woman with her hair in a bun--was crying softly as she ran her hand over one of Striker's interior panels. He should have known her name, but his mind was a swirling blank.  
It would have been nice, he thought, to have some illusions about coming back from this.  
But as he looked over at the Marshall--serene as a lion carved from stone, his eyes closed as the technies flitted around him--his mind wiped itself, turned itself over, and wiped again.  
He couldn't keep a thought in his head.  
He was absurdly aware of how shaky his own breathing was, knew he should get himself under control before he embarrassed himself.  
Without knowing what he was going to say, he opened his mouth to speak to the Marshall, but a second later, someone was handing him his helmet, and that was that.  
He had a split-second thought about himself becoming as close-lipped as Herc, as finally turning into his old man, but the thought settled like a dried leaf. There would be no time for that.  
His hands did not tremble as he pulled the helmet on.

Chuck loved Striker--loved it the way a child loves their home, purely and unconscsiously, knowing that bastion would always be there.  
He knew it would carry them well.  
Tendo's voice crackled over the intercom, but he wasn't listening. Or, he was--but he was filled with this strange gray not-calm, no feelings whatsoever.  
This was the end of the world.  
He took a breath, and took the first step down onto Striker's contact-pedals.  
He listened for long moments to the countdown, fighting to steady his breathing, feeling his hands sweat in his gloves and knowing his undersuit's armpits would be soaked.  
"...engaged--"  
He felt rather than heard perfect quiet, the amazing, unbelievable silence of the Drift.  
Then the memories, washing forward like waves of film--and all of them his own.  
Stacker carried nothing into the drift.  
This much he realized when they flipped their switches and their handshake came not like a slap or a punch or a hug, but like him stepping onto a vast and dark stage, luminous as if he was the only light there.  
And Stacker was not the darkness; he contained it. Chuck felt himself completely engulfed by the older man's mind, and had a moment to feel awed before the drift hit him.  
Stacker carried nothing into the drift.  
So Chuck brought something out for him.  
Fighting to pull memories and thoughts to the forefront was like trying to walk sideways through a rushing stream, but this time the stream was nothing but himself, no one else's thoughts to sift through or recoil from. He had enough of Herc's memories to push the first few out without fighting too hard.  
The sly first few times he'd caught the tails of his father's thoughts about Stacker--standing tall and perfectly still, helmet under one arm, gold of the sunlight ticking off the black points of the drivesuit. Stacker was years younger, smiling, proud.  
Another, him in his dress uniform, and Chuck was in Herc's shoes, wearing his father's memory like a shroud. How perfectly he remembered the small of Stacker's back, the curve of the crisp jacket, the collar, the back of Stacker's neck where soft cloth met softer skin.  
(He has another memory, flitting and overlaid, of what that spot tastes like, when the skin was flushed and sweaty. He remembers feeling his hands itch with the desire to touch him between his shoulders, to wrap an arm around his waist, to feel Stacker turn towards him smiling. And then the memories of doing just that, like bookends on a shelf.)  
Laughing together somewhere, the way Stacker's bottom teeth were slightly crooked and how endearing it was when he laughed, and tilted his head just slightly--  
Phone calls, the feeling of worry and hurt like a punch in the gut. A flattening certainty of knowledge like a gray hand clutching at him.  
He swallowed, his eyes still closed.  
(Herc's eyes, blue in the mirror and lit from someone else's bathroom, a metal tin of pills on the sink and a feeling of sadness so strong he almost doubled over. Herc's face was younger but the memory felt thousands of years old, tired as death. Behind him, the bathroom door opening just a crack, before the memory cut to black.)  
(Chuck was good at picking-and-choosing memories. He'd been in and out of the Drift since he was fifteen. He could probably do this for an hour, for three, for nine. For as long as it took them to make it to the Breach.)  
So many more, Stacker sitting behind a desk, glancing casually at him (at Herc, whose pulse sped up and who shifted in his seat) and smirking. The flare of Herc's residual love was sharp as a knife in his chest.  
Mere days ago, when he'd returned to the Hong Kong 'dome with Becket in tow, and the first time seeing him there, almost ghostlike in blue, perfectly serene where he stood.  
In the memory, the people were a sea churning around him, and the only person standing still was Stacker. Stacker, looking at Herc with knowing, sad, eyes. And with love in return.  
And the love was everything, was perfect, was strong enough to sear him completely clean.

In the end, Stacker, blinked a few times, his breath coming slower. He turned his head slightly.  
"Thank you."  
"...Yeah," Chuck rasped. "Yeah, he...he couldn't hide that. He felt that way about my mum, too. It's--it got me through a lot. Knowing he felt like that."  
Stacker nodded, then, and Chuck rode the breath, felt it as he felt Stacker drawing air into his own lungs, and felt the exhale leave him hollow.  
"It'll see us to the end of this, then."  
They dropped Striker. Freefall of the great, great weight around them, their titan bearing them down, and it was only after a great distance and height that their feet finally struck the bottom.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry.


End file.
